Culture Wars

Do any of you really care less about what the media thinks about itself? To all the philosophers out there, yes, I get there’s an infinite regress being set up here. I am, after all, in the media talking about the media talking about itself. But forget that for a moment and answer the question. I bet for most of you it’s no. But gauging from the readers’ commentariat of many online publications, for a small, but significant minority of media audiences, it’s a big yes.

What I want to know is: how did such a tedious trend take off? When did the media become obsessed with itself? And, more importantly, when did readers start to mirror this obsession?

Admittedly, I didn’t spend too much time researching the historical roots of this phenomenon. But I have a feeling that although it’s always been around, the media’s obsession with itself, and your obsession with this obsession, really took off during what the media likes to call the ‘Culture Wars’. I’m pretty sure I heard someone at a dinner party crammed with smug lefties say quite authoritatively that the phenomenon had something to do with the rise of a political movement called ‘neo-conservatism’ and the neo-cons’ need for an enemy against which they could define themselves.

Continue reading "You’re either with us, or with the cultural terrorists" »

It’s a show that deals with the most ideologically contested decade in living memory, but neither the Left nor Right have stepped up to the plate and dragged Mad Men into the culture wars.
 

The third season of Mad Men, the cult hit TV show set (thus far) in a Kennedy-era ad agency, is about to be broadcast in Australia by cable channel Movie Extra. The show is now closing in on 1964 ­- the year when the Sixties really began to swing.

By the season’s finale JFK will be history and the Beatles three months away from setting off the baby boomer youthquake that, within four years, will have torn the US and, to a greater or lesser extent, the rest of the Western world in two, setting in motion a host of rancorous political conflicts that are still being played out five decades later.

Continue reading "Where are all the angry white mad men?" »